In one of our southwest states, comedy is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been so for a long time, and this columnist has found it hard to resist laughing after its every scene and act. But the awful quality of comedy is that laughter is a burden. You laugh because the matter is very sad, very overpowering as it moves you to tears and indignation.

Laughter is closer to the darkness of our civilization than we may imagine.

"The difference between tragedy and comedy," remarks Aaron Allstoy, "tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else." Spot the difference.

Let us begin with the comedian-in-chief in that state. He tries to carry himself like the greatest sage of the region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Let us forget that he does not have his height or bearing. He does not have any charisma whatsoever. Let us forgive him for those. But he goes about with the caricature of Awo’s cap. He wants to brutalise us into believing that he is Awo reincarnate. Haba! Maybe he thinks he is a budding Awo. He should read his history books. He is an engineer though. I wonder how much of history nourishes that soul of his. Awo began in a grander way. Awo was no lie. He reminds me of a literary giant, Northrop Frye, who had many false followers. We call them small fries today. False followership is not strange in history. Zik had his. Soyinka mocked an Okunnu in his prison notes. Even in his life time, Karl Marx denied many who called themselves Marxists. Said he: "If those people are Marxists, then I myself am no Marxist."

But Awo had ideas, this so-called governor has none. Awo won elections without doubt. This man’s so-called victory is being challenged in court. The flurry of forensic evidence and other facts have turned him to a desperate little urchin in politics. He reminds me of a script in one of the plays of Shakespeare in which a character warned. "Tush! Tush! Fear little boys with bugs." The play is The taming of the Shrew.

He is a little boy in politics. He is, however, involved in a politics of bugs and diseases. See, for instance, one of his first acts of comedy. He wanted to turn the law on its head. A speaker in a different dispensation is sworn in to a different dispensation. He asked the man from yesterday to swear in the cabinet of tomorrow. A sommersault of due process. This was a big lie. The kind of thing Awo would have recoiled from. He went ahead anyway.

The interesting thing, though, is that he is not the only comedian in the play. The Speaker, a supine fellow, delights in drawing attention to himself for the wrong reasons. He allowed the matter to drag itself into the court as the opposition party could not wait and allow the illegality to stand. The matter went to court and it has dragged for much of what we call a year of illegitimacy of the party in power.

Then a judgment came. It turned out that not only the governor and Speaker are the comedians, but also a judge who loves to feast in commotion. He admitted that the Speaker could stand on the law. The constitution cannot allow a man who is a Speaker in a former House to be a Speaker in a new one without following through the electoral due process. The judge was not only foolish, he made a boldness of his foolishness by clutching at straws for legal support. He said the process of his being made Speaker was wrong, but he could be Speaker anyway. In mathematics, we could compare that to providing an answer without showing how you got there. It is wuru wuru to the answer. If the process is wrong, the answer cannot be right. The only way to describe that is rigging. That is exactly what the opposition is saying in court in challenging the governor as having rigged his way to the Government House. That is exactly what the dubious judge has done in his verdict on the Speaker.

So, what we have in that state of many a PhD and a lot of ignorance is fear. The genre is comedy of fear and loathing. They are afraid they are facing their last time in the saddle. Fear has turned them into monsters and fascists. Monsters operate with the devil’s heart and a dead soul. They were at first afraid of the opposition and the people. Now, that fear has alchemised into hate. "In time," said Shakespeare, "we hate what we often fear."

The fear turns into loathing, a virulent, ruthless, bloodthirsty hate. They now know they cannot hold anything by legitimate means. In a mockery of Malcolm X, they want to use all means necessary if that means doing the most ridiculous thing.

They do not operate in the love of the people. They are operating in fear of the people. They want to cow them by circumventing the instruments of justice as well as the instruments of elections.

That took them to their latest act of comedy of fear and loathing. They went to the state House of Assembly at 5:30 am to pick men of the state electoral body. They did it without forming a quorum. The same Speaker, whose position reminds one of what Christ describes as the abomination that makes desolate, led the gang. According to the plan, they would ask the state radio to announce it at 6 am, after the deed was done. They locked the gate and the civil servants who did not expect to see lawmakers until about 10 am, when they are statutorily required to do business, were aghast.

What could have pushed these men to such dawn perversion? These are lawmakers with no respect for the law.

We can recall that we had a similar instance in Anambra State, and that act of fear and comedy has ended a nullity today. It is an act of great stupidity. Such steps look clever in the beginning. They look triumphal. They seem to have gamed the system into acquiescence and surrender. "In politics," wrote poet Samuel Coleridge, "what begins in fear ends in folly."

The Speaker and the governor are desperate to win the local government elections. They are afraid of the people’s votes. So, they want to make the votes themselves by letting the umpires determine the tally in spite of the people’s verdict. That’s why the comedian in chief hurriedly swore them in.

But the anger of the people cannot be held in leash for ever. They will spill on the streets if they vote one way and the verdict goes another. The currents in the land show that the people are waiting for the verdicts of the courts. Faith and patience in the courts should not be read as surrender.

What they fear may eventually come to them. The real crux of the comedy is that they cannot repair a thing that was spoiled from the beginning. That is why an act of comedy of fear will follow another act of comedy of fear, until the play is over. Suddenly the people will realise that the matter is not funny any more and that nothing is funny when lies lead to heartaches among the people.

Ghandi said: "The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is fear." The people will repudiate this in good time.